Digital with a Film Soul

I get the appeal of film. The texture, the nostalgia, the imperfections. It’s beautiful. But when it comes to weddings, the real emotional and unpredictable days, I choose digital every time.

Weddings move fast. Tears during vows, a quiet glance between two people who just became family, the kind of laughter that only comes from decades of friendship. These moments don’t wait. Digital gives me the freedom to move with the day, to adapt to light and emotion, and to shoot without limits.

That said, I love the look of film. Always have. My entire editing approach was built around it. In fact, my colour palette was developed to emulate the feeling of Portra 400: warm, soft skin tones and natural depth. It took years of refining. So while I don’t shoot film, what I deliver has the same heart and soul, without the risks of missed moments, faulty rolls or lab delays.

A friend of mine recently photographed the birth of his child on film. Once-in-a-lifetime moments. He sent the roll to a lab, and it got stuck in the scanner. The whole thing destroyed. Just like that, all those memories, gone. Nothing left but the story he could tell. It broke my heart.

That’s exactly why I shoot the way I do. I treat wedding memories with the same care and weight I would if it were my own. I shoot with two cameras on me at all times, a third close by, and every camera has dual memory cards, so everything is written in two places the moment it’s taken. I believe in redundancy. In backups on backups. Because these moments are too important not to protect.

For me, it’s about presence. Being there, fully. Reading the room. Catching the fleeting stuff that matters most. Film has its place, no doubt. But when I’m entrusted to document a day that will never happen again, I want nothing left to chance.

That’s why I shoot the way I do.